Panel Faults C.I.A. Over Brutality and Deceit in Interrogations, More Than A Quarter Of The World’s Countries Helped The CIA Run Its Torture Program, Senate report finds CIA torture produced ‘fabricated’ intel and thwarted no plots

Panel Faults C.I.A. Over Brutality and Deceit in Interrogations
By MARK MAZZETTI  DEC. 9, 2014

WASHINGTON — The Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday issued a sweeping indictment of the Central Intelligence Agency’s program to detain and interrogate terrorism suspects in the years after the Sept. 11 attacks, drawing on millions of internal C.I.A. documents to illuminate practices that it said were more brutal — and far less effective — than the agency acknowledged either to Bush administration officials or to the public.

The long-delayed report delivers a withering judgment on one of the most controversial tactics of a twilight war waged over a dozen years. The Senate committee’s investigation, born of what its chairwoman, Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, said was a need to reckon with the excesses of this war, found that C.I.A. officials routinely misled the White House and Congress about the information it obtained, and failed to provide basic oversight of the secret prisons it established around the world.

In exhaustive detail, the report gives a macabre accounting of some of the grisliest techniques that the C.I.A. used to torture and imprison terrorism suspects. Detainees were deprived of sleep for as long as a week, and were sometimes told that they would be killed while in American custody. With the approval of the C.I.A.’s medical staff, some prisoners were subjected to medically unnecessary “rectal feeding” or “rectal hydration” — a technique that the C.I.A.’s chief of interrogations described as a way to exert “total control over the detainee.” C.I.A. medical staff members described the waterboarding of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the chief planner of the Sept. 11 attacks, as a “series of near drownings.”

….The torture of prisoners at times was so extreme that some C.I.A. personnel tried to put a halt to the techniques, but were told by senior agency officials to continue the interrogation sessions.

The Senate report quotes a series of August 2002 cables from a C.I.A. facility in Thailand, where the agency’s first prisoner was held. Within days of the Justice Department’s approval to begin waterboarding the prisoner, Abu Zubaydah, the sessions became so extreme that some C.I.A. officers were “to the point of tears and choking up,” and several said they would elect to be transferred out of the facility if the brutal interrogations continued.

….The committee’s report concluded that of the 119 detainees, “at least 26 were wrongfully held.”

….The program expanded, with dozens of detainees taken to secret prisons in Poland, Romania, Lithuania and other countries. In September 2006, Mr. Bush ordered all of the detainees in C.I.A. custody to be transferred to the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and after that the C.I.A. held a small number of detainees in secret at a different facility for several months at a time, before they were also moved to Guantánamo Bay.

Taken in its entirety, the report is a portrait of a spy agency that was wholly unprepared for its new mission as jailers and interrogators, but that embraced its assignment with vigor. The report chronicles millions of dollars in secret payments between 2002 and 2004 from the C.I.A. to foreign officials, aimed at getting other governments to agree to host secret prisons.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/10/world/senate-intelligence-committee-cia-torture-report.html

More Than A Quarter Of The World’s Countries Helped The CIA Run Its Torture Program  12/09/2014

….According to several U.S. officials involved with the negotiations, the intelligence community has long been concerned that the Senate document would enable readers to identify the many countries that aided the CIA’s controversial torture program between 2002 and roughly 2006. These countries made the CIA program possible in two ways: by enabling rendition, which involved transferring U.S. detainees abroad without due legal process, and by providing facilities far beyond the reach of U.S. law where those detainees were subjected to torture.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/09/cia-torture-countries_n_6297832.html

Senate report finds CIA torture produced ‘fabricated’ intel and thwarted no plots
After waterboarding, 9/11 mastermind told interrogators what ‘he thought they wanted to hear’   By Michael Isikoff   12/9/14

After days of brutal interrogations, in which he was slammed against walls, slapped in the gut, and repeatedly waterboarded — “near drownings” that caused him to vomit — 9/11 architect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed told his CIA interrogators he was “ready to talk.”

The story he told in March 2003: He had sent an al-Qaida operative to Montana to recruit African-Americans for terrorist attacks inside the U.S. The alarming new claim sent FBI agents scrambling to find evidence of the plot, but they came up with nothing.

And for good reason: KSM later admitted he had fabricated the story — that because he was being subjected to such rough measures, he “simply told his interrogators what he thought they wanted to hear,” according to an internal agency cable quoted in the mammoth Senate Intelligence Committee report released on Tuesday by the panel’s chair, Sen. Dianne Feinstein.

The invented Montana plot is only one example of multiple wild-goose chases and other false leads that were produced by the CIA’s use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” — what President Barack Obama himself has labeled “torture” — in the years after 9/11, according to the 489-page Senate report.

“The methods in question … regularly resulted in fabricated information,” the report states in its key findings….

Many of the techniques laid out in the report have been publicly known for years — forced nudity, sleep deprivation, dietary and temperature manipulation, wall slamming and, of course, waterboarding, a practice dating back to the Spanish Inquisition in which subjects are strapped down and doused with water to simulate the experience of drowning….

A CIA prison in Afghanistan (known as the Salt Pit but referred to as COBALT in the report) was described in CIA cables as a “dungeon” where hooded prisoners were kept in complete darkness and shackled in isolated cells with loud noise or music — and only a bucket to use for human waste. One of the detainees died from hypothermia after being left naked from the waist down….

The committee report examined 20 “case studies” in which agency officials had claimed they had thwarted plots or rounded up suspects based on aggressive interrogations. These assertions, the panel found, were “inaccurate and contradicted by the CIA’s own records.”….
https://news.yahoo.com/senate-report-finds-cia-torture-produced–fabricated–intel-and-thwarted-no-plots—232012393.html

CIA Torture Report: Chinese Communist Methods, Waterboarding, Sleep deprivation, Exposure to cold, Physical isolation, Sensory deprivation, Physical degradation

“They were interrogated using methods such as waterboarding, slapping, humiliation, exposure to cold, and sleep deprivation.”
“It described how two instructors from the Navy went to the Guantanamo Bay detention centre in 2002 to teach 24 guards there about methods used by Chinese communists during the Korean War, against American POWs.”

also:  Mind Control Documents & Links

Congress Clashes Over Release Of CIA Torture Report
December 08, 2014  Lauren Hodges

Leaders on Capitol Hill are at odds regarding a report on CIA methods — including torture — used to extract information in the so-called war on terror.

Chairwoman of the Senate intelligence committee Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., has been fighting for the release of her 480-page executive summary of the report since April of this year, and it finally was scheduled for a reveal this week….

NPR’s Sam Sanders reported Sunday that “officials who’ve seen the report say it details sleep deprivation, confinement and waterboarding.”

On Weekend Edition Sunday, NPR’s Mara Liasson spoke with host Rachel Martin about the Obama administration’s view of the release.

“The administration supports releasing the report. And the State Department says Kerry told Feinstein that the timing of the release was her choice. But the administration is concerned about how the report would affect ongoing efforts against ISIS, the Islamic State terrorist group, and the safety of Americans who are being held hostage around the world. And it wants those issues to be taken into account.”….
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/12/07/369262235/congress-clashes-over-release-of-cia-torture-report

U.S. on alert for release of report on CIA’s use of torture
The Canadian Press By Alexander Panetta December 8, 2014

WASHINGTON – For months, there’s been a battle in the shadows of Washington over a report on torture by the CIA.

The covert conflict saw the CIA spy on Congress. Intelligence officials quietly argued against the report’s release, on the basis that it would endanger American lives. The White House eventually stepped in, mediating negotiations about what to include — and what to black out.

It’s being made public now.

A congressional committee that studied the use of torture during the Bush era is poised Tuesday to release a 480-page executive summary of its findings, a heavily scrutinized and edited synopsis of a broader 6,000-page document compiled by a Senate panel….

The CIA admitted to snooping on Senate staffers’ computers while they prepared the report. At first, the agency denied accusations of domestic espionage against the elected body. Eventually, it confessed and apologized, ascribing its actions to the belief that staffers were consulting unauthorized documents.

Still, that failed to mollify members of Congress. Several called for the CIA director’s resignation for what they described as a violation of the country’s basic democratic order….

The report into the CIA comes six years after the Senate released a study into the military — and offered a glimpse into how its interrogation techniques were developed after 9-11.

It described how two instructors from the Navy went to the Guantanamo Bay detention centre in 2002 to teach 24 guards there about methods used by Chinese communists during the Korean War, against American POWs.

The Chinese method came to be rebranded as Biderman’s Principles, after the academic who researched the Korean War practice. He boiled it down to an eight-step program: physical isolation, followed by sensory deprivation, exhaustion and discomfort, threats, occasional rewards, powerlessness, physical degradation, and the enforcement of arbitrary rules.

According to the 2008 Senate report, the Navy trainers handed out a chart on those coercive techniques to the personnel at Guantanamo Bay.
https://ca.news.yahoo.com/u-braces-release-long-awaited-report-cias-torture-221653528.html

CIA torture report: US raises security ahead of release  8 December 2014
The report appears to conclude CIA officials lied about the programme to Bush administration officials….

The full 6,000-page report, produced by the Senate Intelligence Committee, remains classified.

The 480-page summary is being released by Democrats on the panel.

President Barack Obama halted the CIA interrogation programme when he took office in 2009, and has acknowledged that the methods used to question al-Qaeda prisoners amounted to torture.

During the presidency of George W Bush, the CIA operation against al-Qaeda – known internally as the Rendition, Detention and Interrogation – saw as many as 100 suspected terrorists held in “black sites” outside the US.

Analysis: Jon Sopel, BBC North America editor

What more can we learn about the CIA’s interrogation programme from this heavily redacted report? Based on leaks, Tuesday’s release seems to answer three major questions:

First. Were the interrogation methods – torture if you like – more extensive and more brutal than previously admitted? It looks like the conclusion is yes.

Second. Did these interrogation techniques deliver life-saving intelligence to the US? That answer appears to be no.

Third. Were CIA officials at the time honest with the White House on what the programme was getting up to? Again, no….

They were interrogated using methods such as waterboarding, slapping, humiliation, exposure to cold, and sleep deprivation….
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-30383924

Sexual threats, other CIA methods detailed in Senate report
By Mark Hosenball and Jeff Mason   WASHINGTON Mon Dec 8, 2014

(Reuters) – Graphic details about sexual threats and other harsh interrogation techniques the CIA meted out to captured militants will be detailed by a Senate Intelligence Committee report on the spy agency’s anti-terror tactics, sources familiar with the document said.

The report, which the committee’s majority Democrats are expected to release on Tuesday, describes how senior al Qaeda operative Abdel Rahman al Nashiri, suspected mastermind of the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole, was threatened by his interrogators with a buzzing power drill, the sources said. The drill was never actually used on Nashiri.

In another instance, the report documents how at least one detainee was sexually threatened with a broomstick, the sources said….

The report, which took years to produce, charts the history of the CIA’s “Rendition, Detention and Interrogation” program, which Bush authorized after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Bush ended many aspects of the program before leaving office, and Obama swiftly banned so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques,” which critics say are torture, after his 2009 inauguration.

The committee’s bottom-line conclusion is that harsh interrogations did not produce a single critical intelligence nugget that could not have been obtained by non-coercive means.

That conclusion is strongly disputed by many intelligence and counter-terrorism officials, who say that there is no question such interrogations led to major breakthroughs….

While the Justice Department had authorized techniques like sleep deprivation, controls and supervision of such methods were sometimes lax when the CIA began detaining and interrogating militants starting in August 2002, said sources familiar with the interrogation program.

A more rigorous system of monitoring how the techniques were used was in place by early 2003, the sources said….
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/12/08/us-usa-cia-torture-idUKKBN0JM24I20141208

Mind Control Documents & Links
proof mk-ultra exists
This page includes information on mk-ultra, the CIA, mind control, Operation Paperclip and the Nazis, the 1995 congressional hearings, the 2010 veterans vs CIA court case,  Artichoke, the CIA Supreme Court cases, Ewen Cameron and the Sleep Room and the MK/Naomi project.
https://ritualabuse.us/mindcontrol/mc-documents-links/

A warning on ‘torture report’ release

A warning on ‘torture report’ release
By Michael Isikoff August 8, 2014 Yahoo News

….The memo, with its stark warnings about potential violence, is the latest development in a struggle  between Feinstein’s committee and the CIA over how many details should be made public about the agency’s use of “enhanced interrogation” — including the near drowning technique known as waterboarding — of top terror suspects. The techniques were authorized by the Bush administration in the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks, but were banned by President Obama when he took office .

Intelligence sources familiar with the report say it graphically describes — in some cases, with grisly details — the harsh tactics that agency officers and contractors used for weeks at a time to try to get top suspects like Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to talk. The report also recounts the death of an Afghan suspect after he was shackled and left half naked in freezing temperatures in an agency interrogation facility known as “the Salt Pit” in 2002.

The committee accuses CIA officials of misrepresenting the program to Congress and the Justice Department, claiming it yielded important intelligence about potential terror plots that were actually learned elsewhere, the sources said. Another charge is that the agency undercounted the number of detainees who were subjected to such harsh methods, asserting in 2006 it was no more than 100, leaving out about 20 others who received similar rough treatment in Afghanistan. Both findings have been sharply challenged by former CIA officials who are planning a lengthy rebuttal when the report is released.

When the intelligence committee approved, on a partisan vote, the report last April, Feinstein said “the results were shocking” and that the report “exposes brutality that stands in stark contrast to our values as a nation.”

“This will be an ugly story when it comes out,” agrees one U.S. intelligence official familiar with the findings of the report…..
http://news.yahoo.com/a-warning-on–torture-report–release-233244652.html

Germany’s Shelter for Victims of Ritual Abuse

Germany’s Shelter for Victims of Ritual Abuse
By Antonia Oettingen

Gaby Breitenbach has seen and heard some awful things. The German psychotherapist is telling me about how sometimes, from a very young age, women are systematically tortured by people seeking to split their minds into multiple identities. The desire is to control the victims, of course, but also to leave them with an identity that seems perfectly normal to strangers. While the victim’s everyday identity will have no “memory” of the trauma they’ve experienced, Breitenbach says the abusers are able to “summon” the other identities with various triggers. This can be something as simple as a ringtone, for example.

This method of mind control is known as “ritual abuse.” Most of the time the abuse is sexual in nature. Sometimes the abusers crave power; sometimes they’re just being cruel. Sometimes they’re pseudo-religious nutjobs, sometimes they’re fascists, and oftentimes they are organized crime networks. Sometimes the abusers use their victims to gain membership to a secret society; sometimes they flick a switch in their minds to make them commit suicide. The world can be an incredibly shitty place.

Last month, Breitenbach opened a safehouse to treat victims of ritual abuse in Germany. Vielseits, which translates to versatility, is the first of its kind in Europe and offers trauma therapy to anyone who walks through its doors….

Can you tell me about the kind of women who seek help at Vielseits?

All the women who end up with us are victims of organized, sadistic, and sexual violence, who have been subjected to mind control. There are also organizations practicing ritual abuse with a kind of spiritual superstructure where certain ideologies come into play, such as neo-fascist mindsets or different pseudo-religious groups, like Scientology or satanic cults.

From an outsider’s perspective, these are women who appear to have led seemingly normal lives—their everyday persona wouldn’t have been aware of the abuse they were subjected to at night, weekends, or on school holidays. These traumatic experiences are contained in different parts of the identity, so they’re kept away from the conscious, and the person has no knowledge of the trauma they’ve experienced.

How are these personas created?

The victims are subjected to near-death situations—with the help of electric shocks, waterboarding, or other forms of torture—from an early age, and then they’re “rescued” by their tormentors. At some point the victim’s psyche will develop an automated response—it will split, in a bid to survive. As a consequence of the systematic torture, the victims can develop a range of different identities throughout their lifetimes. Offenders perpetrating the abuse hold the key to this system of split identities and have the power to evoke a specific set of behaviors using triggers—which can be hand signs or certain smells or sounds, like a ringtone….
http://www.vice.com/en_ca/read/ritual-abuse-sanctuary-vielseits

Exclusive: Senate probe finds little evidence of effective “torture”

Exclusive: Senate probe finds little evidence of effective “torture”
By Mark Hosenball Reuters 4/28/12

A nearly three-year-long investigation by Senate Intelligence Committee Democrats is expected to find there is little evidence the harsh “enhanced interrogation techniques” the CIA used on high-value prisoners produced counter-terrorism breakthroughs.

People familiar with the inquiry said committee investigators, who have been poring over records from the administration of President George W. Bush, believe they do not substantiate claims by some Bush supporters that the harsh interrogations led to counter-terrorism coups.

The backers of such techniques, which include “water-boarding,” sleep deprivation and other practices critics call torture, maintain they have led to the disruption of major terror plots and the capture of al Qaeda leaders….

Other coercive techniques included sleep deprivation, making people crouch or stretch in stressful positions and slamming detainees against a flexible wall.

The CIA started backing away from such techniques in 2004. Obama banned them shortly after taking office….
http://news.yahoo.com/exclusive-senate-probe-finds-little-evidence-effective-torture-051456121.html